This blog is devoted to evaluating vulnerable Democratic candidates, political news, law and current affairs. Author is a Political consultant specializing in opposition research for conservative candidates, attorneys and PACS at the local, state, and federal level.
“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”
― Patrick Henry

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Monday, April 28, 2014

Garett Jones reviews Piketty

Spot on review:

Market-oriented economies that learn to live with inequality will reap the rewards: More domestic capital for workers to use on their jobs, more foreign capital flowing in to a country perceived as a safe investment, and a political and cultural system that can spend its time on topics other than the 1 percent. Market-oriented economies that instead follow Piketty’s preferred path—taxing capital heavily, preferably through international consortiums so the taxes are harder to evade—will end up with less domestic and foreign capital, fewer lenders willing to fund new housing projects, fewer new office buildings, and a cultural system focused on who has more and who has less.

…The Boston University economist Christophe Chamley and the Stanford economist Kenneth Judd came up independently with what we might call the Chamley-Judd Redistribution Impossibility Theorem: Any tax on capital is a bad idea in the long run, and that the overwhelming effect of a capital tax is to lower wages. A capital tax is such a bad idea that even if workers and capitalists really were two entirely separate groups of people—if workers could only eat their wages and capitalists just lived off of their interest like a bunch of trust-funders—it would still be impossible to permanently tax capitalists, hand the tax revenues to workers, and make the workers better off.

And:

…One lesson of this story is that it’s good to be patient. So let’s start training ourselves and our children to delay gratification, to forego that great sound system on the new car, to eat at home a little more often.

Quotes

"If it's smart to look at the Carfax history of a used car before buying it, why should anyone object to discovering the history of politicians before electing them to serve you?" Stephen Marks

"I believe that public office is the noblest of professions, but I also believe we must hold public officials accountable. Exposing the full truth about them-the good and the bad-ultimately makes for better-educated voters and a stronger democracy." Stephen Marks in Politics Magazine.